Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Fashion designer and entrepreneur best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee.
On the island
Eight records
It's got a very uplifting message that says inside everybody there is something wonderful if we can just unearth it. But my dad was a huge music fan. He loved blues and soul and dance music of all descriptions. He used to drive me down to school from Edinburgh down to Barner Castle. It's about a three and a half hour drive and we'd just sit in the car and do that kind of John Gordon Sinclair kind of dancing against a tree thing in our seats. And it was, you know, lovely memories of sharing music with him.
It's a beautiful piece of music. It's called My Heart's in the Highlands. It's a Rubby Burns poem and song that has been set to the organ. It's incredibly evocative of the Highlands. Every sound of that organ feels like the kind of mist and the clouds sitting in the valleys. And my heart is in the Highlands. I feel most at home and most relaxed when I'm up a mountain, either on my bike or on foot. And I always have done.
James Godfrey and I used to go to a roller disco in Edinburgh called Coasters and we would be weaving round backwards doing little spins, little crossovers and they played a lot of amazing music at Coasters. This was the period of the lot of disco and Sylvester was one of the biggest. The first couple of bars and I am back at Coasters with my blue with a rainbow roller skates on being really cool as a 12 year old.
Big Time Sensuality (Fluke Magimix remix)
I was trying to find the one song that kind of encapsulated six years of going out clubbing, raving, whatever you want to call it. This was one, like this song, you know, I can remember my friend Dave running onto the dance floor when this came on at Vague. And Vegue was an amazing club because it was the first big club in Leeds where everybody dressed up. Everybody wore what they want. I remember our friend James once went down. He painted himself head to toe in gold and he had these twigs that he'd sprayed and he claimed he was the king of the wood sprites. And he had these sort of speedos on that he'd also sprayed gold. And then halfway through the night, he whipped the speedos off and everything was sprayed gold. And that was the kind of place Vague was. Everything went. It was such a joyous place. And this was a big song. But I also took this Bjork album with me around Greece for the summer and I must have played it a hundred times on my Walkman's.
It's a kind of anti war protest song. Tom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood had heard an interview with Harry Patch on the radio where Harry Patch was the oldest surviving soldier from the First World War and he didn't talk about the war at all for something like 87 years. He was invited to go and meet a German soldier, the oldest surviving German soldier from the First World War. And they met and they shook hands and they spent time together. And he wanted to talk about what a terrible waste of life war is. And my granddad died in the war. My mum grew up without a father because of the war. And it's an incredibly touching piece of music and it uses some of the things that Harry Patch said in the interview. I worked with Tom York. We did the costume for an Atoms for Peace video. Having loved Radiohead for all of these years, to be invited to work with Tom directly was such an honour.
Kill DemFavourite
It's a song that I can't sit still to. This is just a great dance tune.
This is I think the saddest song I know. Um so this is a song that came out during Covid. And it's about somebody struggling with the loss of a loved one. And um I lost my dad during Covid. And I mean there's a little shout out to the NHS in the lyrics and at the end there's a little there's a little recording. And um It's just the the loved one in question is a little clip of them saying better to their partner. And it's these little fragments of lives that we hold on to when we're when we're grieving. And um it's it's a lovely song, it's a beautiful song. Of course it brings back memories of my dad and uh It's it's also it's kind of uplifting because we will get through and um you know and hanging on to these little things allows us to treasure the memories. And the things that that I treasure that were my dad's pieces of his clothing and I I have his ties and when you tie them you can only tie them in one way because he's tied them so many times. The knot only forms the knot that he would wear. So you you know that his fingers were there holding that silk in exactly the same way. And this song is a lovely song because it reminds me that things will Get better.
The Young Fathers are an Edinburgh band. What I love about Young Fathers is as a band they feel like the very best of how multicultural Britain contributes positively to our society. The way that people from other places bring so much value to our lives is, I think, encapsulated in this sort of very culturally rich small band that make amazing music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:47Were you the kind of kid who would take their toys apart to try and figure out how they worked?
I was just always Always enjoyed the meticulousness of putting things together with my hands and it always made me feel really good and the outcomes were always things that I was really proud of and got great pleasure from.
Presenter asks
2:08Is the friendliness of The Great British Sewing Bee about the format or about the kind of people who like sewing?
I think it's about all of those things. I think naturally people tend to sew in groups. We didn't invent the term sewing bee. Sewing bees have been around for a long, long time. There were sewing bees at Buckingham Palace. The Queen Mother had sewing bees during the war to make things for the war effort. All the palace staff got together and sewed in one of the big ballrooms, amazing photos. So I think on the whole, people tend to sew with other people. I mean, in our workshop, our tailors are always chatting as they sew. There is just a communal vibe around sewing that translates very naturally into what happens on sewing bee. We never discouraged it. And then, of course, there is the fabulous people themselves who are just warm-hearted, lovely, kind, generous individuals. Almost without exception, we've had the most lovely people on the show.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Mike Abbott
It's an encyclopedia of woodworking techniques, but it starts all the way back at the tree, which is useful, because it'll teach me how to make planks before I make everything else.
The luxury
I'm gonna make myself a piano. I'm gonna start with a xylophone. And then I'm going to work my way up. I can probably make an oboe, I reckon.
What was your relationship with your father like? Did you look up to him?
He was quite a closed character. He had a very difficult upbringing. He lost his dad when he was quite young. His father took his own life. which we found out much later. He never spoke about it at all. And so when I grew up I didn't know that he'd had this terrible, difficult, traumatic childhood. But he loved sport and rugby and that was our thing. On on Sunday mornings we would go to the back pitchers at uh Murrayfield and myself and people that I'm still friends with today, we all played in the same mini rugby team. And we were super successful. We won loads of tournaments. We traveled all around Scotland. We were actually really good.
Presenter asks
16:39You noticed an ad in the Financial Times and made a bold decision during a college lunch hour. What actually happened?
There was nobody else around, so I sat and I read the paper and I got to a section at the back which I'd never seen before in my life called Businesses for Sale. And in Businesses for Sale was this tiny little postage stamp-sized advert and it said for sale, tailor to emperors, kings, and presidents. Please write to Mr. Granger at 16 Savile Row. And I thought, wow, is that a Saville Row Tailor for sale? So I wrote him a letter and I went to see the shop and I thought, I can't believe that this is an actual, like an actual Saville Row Tailor's that was at the time nearly 200 years old, was for sale in the back of the paper.
Presenter asks
21:09In 2015 you bought the Cookson and Clegg factory in Blackburn, but within a year you had to put it into voluntary liquidation and make staff redundant. What do you remember about that tough time?
Oh, it was awful. It was absolutely awful. We had a plan when I took over the business. One of the ideas that emerged was the idea behind community clothing, but it took a while to get that up and running. And we had a couple of really big contracts at Cookson's, and one of them, very well-known high street brand, didn't pay their bill for a very long time. And the other, a very well-known British sportswear brand, cancelled a huge contract with about two weeks to go, and it killed us. And I had to make everybody redundant. And I scrambled to find the money to buy the machinery back from the liquidators. And we managed to come to an arrangement with our landlord, and all of our suppliers got paid, and we made sure that everything was good, and we got back up and running again.
Presenter asks
29:17The fashion industry has a huge environmental impact, even at the sustainable end. Is that something you struggle with?
We just consume too much stuff. We consume too much stuff in every aspect of our lives now. And as somebody who loves really good things, I find it incredibly depressing. Businesses started outsourcing the making of the things that they sell to other people. And when they first did it, that was fine, because they took something that was made locally and they moved it to Hong Kong and they had somebody make a version of it in Hong Kong. And it was sort of almost the same. But then over the last 30, 40 years, every six months they've gone back to that factory and said, Can you make it a bit cheaper? And eventually that factory says, oh, I can't make it any cheaper. So they go to somebody else and oh, we can make it cheaper. But they use lower quality materials, but they make them thinner. And then they make them and and every six months the things we buy in our ordinary life have got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And now the things that we buy are so universally rubbish, they have no value to us at all.
“I was just always Always enjoyed the meticulousness of putting things together with my hands and it always made me feel really good and the outcomes were always things that I was really proud of and got great pleasure from.”
“He was quite a closed character. He had a very difficult upbringing. He lost his dad when he was quite young. His father took his own life. which we found out much later. He never spoke about it at all. And so when I grew up I didn't know that he'd had this terrible, difficult, traumatic childhood. But he loved sport and rugby and that was our thing.”
“I remember walking into the shop on Saville Row and thinking, Yeah, I I can do better than this”
“It was horrifying. I mean, my dad was made redundant, so I saw it from that side. It's it's traumatic in a very real way for people, and having to do it en masse to all of those people was dreadful.”
“We just consume too much stuff. We consume too much stuff in every aspect of our lives now. And as somebody who loves really good things, I find it incredibly depressing.”